Europe

Peter Taaffe, general secretary of the Socialist Party (CWI in England &
Wales)

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory is a political earthquake that transforms the
situation in Britain and poses stark questions for how a new mass
socialist force can be built.

Jeremy Corbyn achieved a spectacular victory in the Labour leadership
election with 59% of the total vote, scoring an unprecedented quarter of
a million votes, including nearly 50% of full Labour Party members and a
magnificent 84% of the £3 registered supporters. This election was a
victory for the left, anti-austerity campaign and for working people
generally. Yet within days, the hounds of the capitalist media were
predictably let loose in a concerted campaign seeking to savage and
discredit him.

‘Catastrophe’, ‘unelectable’, ‘disaster’ were just some of the more
moderate phrases churned out to describe his election and to write off
any future for him, his ideas and the forces which his campaign have
aroused. Like former Labour leader Michael Foot before him, his dress
sense was ridiculed. As if not wearing a tie was more important to the
millions looking for deliverance from Cameron’s capitalist barbarism
than his very accurate charge of ‘poverty deniers’ levelled against the
Tory government!

A whipped up synthetic fury was generated because he quite correctly
refused to sing the ‘national anthem’ – originally an anti-Scottish and
pro-imperialist hymn to a relic of feudalism. Despite his well-known
anti-monarchist, pro-republican views, and his silent recognition for
the victims of war, he was still unreservedly condemned. Corbyn would be
absolutely correct not to bow the knee to the monarchy and it would be
wrong to now retreat, as some Labour spokespersons have advised, and
mouth the words of the national anthem. If he bends under pressure on
this issue, then he can retreat on bigger and more fundamental issues.
Moreover, he would then be accused of complete hypocrisy! The monarchy
is maintained, swallowing up huge amounts of taxpayers’ money, not just
for decorative purposes or to help to stupefy the masses. It is a
possible political weapon in the future around which capitalist reaction
could mobilise at a certain stage against a democratic, left and
socialist government, perhaps one led by Jeremy Corbyn himself.

The plotting begins

The defeated right wing of the Labour Party also joined in the campaign
of vilification, fuelling the press campaign by effectively going on
strike, pursuing ‘non-co-operation’, refusing to collaborate with Corbyn
on his frontbench team, with open personal and political criticisms
disparaging Corbyn and everything he stands for.

However, even before the leadership election they had been utterly
discredited by their pro-big business measures when their leaders –
Blair and Brown – were in power. Their candidate Liz Kendall received a
meagre 4.5% of the vote. In a pathetic echo of a slogan of Scottish
nationalists after the referendum, they lamented ‘We are the 4.5%’! Yet
it took less than a week for the visible fault lines of a future
possible split within the Labour Party, particularly in the
Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), to be revealed. Despite the scale of
Corbyn’s victory – he got a bigger vote than Blair – in reality, while
facing the Tory enemy, he has behind him on the Labour parliamentary
benches just 15 to 20 MPs who actually voted for him in the leadership
contest. The majority of his ‘own side’ are potential political
assassins, waiting for the first opportunity to knife him in the back.

Former ‘Labour’ splitters, such as the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, who
infamously defected to the traitors of the Social Democratic Party (SDP)
in 1981, recognises with Shirley Williams, one of the original ‘Gang of
Four’, that the immediate aftermath of a landslide election for Corbyn
is not a propitious time to repeat this. The ground has not yet been
fully prepared. Nevertheless, as Robert Peston, the BBC commentator, has
revealed, the right is already plotting, with unnamed Labour
right-wingers negotiating with the hated Osborne and raising the idea of
going over to the Tories at a certain stage. The Evening Standard
reported approaches to the Liberal Democrats.

It is not fanciful to envisage that if a right-wing Eurosceptic split
takes place in the Tory party in the aftermath of a probable EU
referendum next year, those Tory MPs who are left could easily link up
with right-wing ‘Labour’ MPs in a new political realignment. After all,
they have a shared political position supporting Osborne and Cameron’s
brutal defence of capitalism and the savage programme of cuts that flows
from this.

A defining moment which profoundly affected the Labour leadership
campaign was the spectacle of Labour MPs refusing to vote against the
cruel Welfare Bill which will see a halving of welfare payments to
millions of families who will not be compensated by an increase in the
pitiful minimum wage, as Osborne claims. This involved not just open
right wingers but those like Andy Burnham, who was originally touted by
some trade union general secretaries as a ‘left’ alternative candidate
to Corbyn!

However the ground has to be properly prepared by the right-wing Labour
forces for their plots to succeed. When in 1931 Ramsay MacDonald and the
Labour traitors who supported him betrayed Labour and organised the
National Government together with the Tories, Herbert Morrison, Peter
Mandelson’s grandfather, wanted to join him. But he was advised by
Macdonald and his supporters to remain within the ‘Labour fold’ in order
to protect the rump of the Labour party from falling into the grip of
the left.

A similar division of labour was employed by the Labour right who
remained within the Labour Party when the SDP was formed in 1981. Roy
Hattersley, writing in the Guardian, reveals this. He declares: “There
is a real risk of disintegration. There will be no formal split [but]
the parliamentary party ought to take control of the political agenda –
using the Thursday evening meeting to discuss the line that Labour
should take in the House of Commons debates and, where necessary, voting
to confirm the decision… As late as 1984, the Shadow Cabinet found that
unilateralism was on the agenda. Denis Healey simply announced: ‘We
won’t have it’. That is the spirit in which moderates should agree to
serve”.

There you have it! The Corbyn surge, the democratic wishes of Labour
voters and members, who attended unprecedented mass meetings, the 30,000
and more who joined Labour in the first days after Corbyn’s victory
looking for change, should be just swept aside. In its place a
parliamentary ‘dictatorship’ of the ‘4.5%’ should rule the roost within
the PLP, which should in turn dictate to the mass forces which have
gathered behind Corbyn.

After the 1981 split, Hattersley became the deputy leader of the Labour
Party under then Labour leader ‘Baron’ Neil Kinnock. He shows
breath-taking hypocrisy when he explains how they expelled us, Militant
supporters (now the Socialist Party) for allegedly being ‘organised’.
Yet he describes in the same article how the right ‘organised’,
ineffectually it has to be said, against the left and particularly
Militant. He writes: “Labour Solidarity” – the misnamed Labour
right-wing organisation – “set up in 1981, kept the details of its
operations secret, not because they were sinister, but because they were
risible”. In other words, as we pointed out at the time, including in
live television debates viewed by millions of workers, we faced
expulsion from the Labour Party not because we were ‘organised’ but
because we were better organised than the right in fighting for a
working class, socialist programme!

Nobody could foresee

Hattersley issues a clarion call to the current diminished forces of
right-wing Labour: “The sooner the fightback begins the better”.
However, he and the rest of the gaggle of former discredited right-wing
Labour leaders who sought to intervene against Corbyn in the leadership
election, have already completely failed. Tony Blair admitted that they
are at a loss to explain the colossal changes which have taken place in
the objective situation between the early 1990s and today: “I don’t
understand how this situation could develop”. His denunciation of
Corbyn, together with those of Gordon Brown and Kinnock, buttressed by
every capitalist paper, had as much effect as a drop of water on a hot
stove. Indeed, so discredited were Blair and the three other candidates
who stood on the right, that attacks from this quarter on Corbyn
enormously reinforced his attraction to millions of young people,
workers and even sections of the middle-class. Nevertheless, the
suppressed outrage that ‘their’ party seems to have been taken away from
them by Corbyn has bubbled to the surface. Such is their anger towards
Corbyn that within days of his election victory, the embryo of a future
right split is evident.

Equally on the left, in the aftermath of May’s general election, some of
the forces to be found around Corbyn now were weighing up the future
prospects of the left, in what appeared to be limited possibilities for
progress within the Labour Party. Patrick Wintour in the Guardian has
revealed that John McDonnell, now the shadow chancellor, spoke “of
creating a new political formation, something that came close to
advocating a new party”. At the Bakers Union conference, he said: “There
are not enough socialists… It is time we started to get together… And
let us have one common front against austerity. Let’s start working
together and maybe from that we can get an electoral formation that is
more effective”. Clearly, just after the election, a new mass workers’
party was in the air, even to those who were to be found later around
the Corbyn campaign. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC),
in crystallising this consciousness that a working class political
alternative was an urgent imperative, has had an effect on the Corbyn
forces.

But nobody could foresee – even John McDonnell – in advance what would
be the lightning conductor for the accumulated rage against austerity.
In Scotland, it was the pro-independence campaign – and the bitter
opposition expressed towards Labour, the ‘red Tories’ – around which
young people and workers mobilised in what was really a mass
anti-austerity rising. We supported the right of self-determination and
the ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum. However, there were some alleged
‘Marxists’ who, incredibly, were on the other side of the barricades,
shamefully supporting right-wing Labour’s ‘No’ vote. After the
referendum, however, they performed an amazing, unprincipled volte face,
abandoning without any explanation their ossified position held for
decades that ‘work within Labour was the only alternative’. The fact
that they never worked within a right-wing empty Labour party was
immaterial to the propagandistic sects, which never seek to engage with
the real movements of the working class. The ‘traditional organisation’
for them was now the tiny Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) which they duly
worked within!

No absolutes

We, on the other hand, as the accompanying article reprinted from Socialism
Today indicates, have never had a fetish where parties and political
formations are concerned. In 2002 we declared: “There are no absolutes
in politics for Marxism, short of the fact that capitalism is incapable
of satisfying the needs of the working class and humankind in general.
Moreover, Lenin remarked that history knows all kinds of changes. Some
of them can be of the most unlikely character. In the early 1990s, we,
then Militant, now the Socialist Party, took a decision to work
independently from Labour in order to carry on a struggle in defence of
working-class rights and conditions, and for socialism. It was no longer
possible to do this within the increasingly rightward moving Labour
Party”.

But we also explained that while “the further shift to the right under
Blair transformed Labour into an open capitalist party... Theoretically,
Marxism has never discounted that, under the impact of great historic
shocks – a serious economic crisis, mass social upheaval – the ex-social
democratic parties could move dramatically towards the left. Marxism is
not dogmatic. History demonstrates that mass parties of the working
class can move from left to right and back again. Bourgeois parties
also, or a section of them, can break away and form the nucleus of new
workers’ parties, and former workers’ parties can metamorphose into
bourgeois parties”.

Since this was written there have indeed been great ‘historic shocks’:
the 2007-08 world economic crisis, massive upheavals in southern Europe,
Ireland, etc, and the Corbyn phenomena presages similar upheavals in
Britain. In 2002, it was impossible to envisage the precise form which
this struggle to build a mass workers’ party would take. In answer to
those who envisaged an internal ‘long march’ to reverse the grip of the
right wing and ‘reclaim’ the Labour Party, the late Bob Crow quipped:
“Reclaim the Labour Party? We can’t even reclaim our flat!” He was
referring to the difficulties which his union had encountered in trying
to get the then deputy leader of the Labour Party, John Prescott, to end
his occupancy of a low-rent flat owned by the RMT.

This position with Labour remained the case right up to the last few
months. The Corbyn surge came primarily from fresh forces outside of the
Labour Party, with a partial influx of past members – not forgetting
four million lost voters in disgust at Blair’s role – who had been
utterly repelled and disillusioned by the Iraq war and the
pro-privatisation, anti-working class programme of Blair and Brown.
Jeremy Corbyn was the catalyst for this development. However, for it to
become durable and lasting, the forces gathered around this campaign –
the 30,000 who applied for Labour Party membership within days of his
victory – must be provided with a perspective, a programme and an
organisational structure that can go to the end in a struggle with
capitalism and its agents, because that is what they are, on the right
wing of the PLP and within the party apparatus at local and national
level.

Channelling the surge

How to do this? Firstly, it must recognise that the Corbyn surge has its
roots in the same phenomena which resulted in the ‘Green surge’ and the
mass movement around the Scottish referendum. It was the deep crisis of
capitalism in Britain and worldwide – with its attendant savage cuts in
living standards, the housing crisis, etc – that fatally undermined
Blairism, right-wing social democracy, not just in Britain but
worldwide. This is illustrated clearly in the fresh lessons of Greece.
Syriza came to power only in January of this year! But the subsequent
betrayal by Tsipras of the Greek workers’ hopes and his acceptance of
the savage cuts in living standards by the troika were equivalent to the
sell-out of the social democratic leaders on 4 August, 1914, which paved
the way for the devastating world war. Capitulation by the Greek
government means continuing the civil war against the living standards
of the masses of the workers. Not least of the effects of this is the
real danger of the right-wing New Democracy winning in this month’s
general election alongside the ominous return also of the fascist Golden
Dawn.

The Green surge rose rapidly but tended to ebb equally speedily, partly
because of the failure of the Greens to politically satisfy these new
layers and also because of the potential powerful pull of Corbynism,
which has partly occupied their political ground and compelled Green MP
Caroline Lucas, for instance, to offer collaboration with Corbyn in the
anti-austerity campaign. Another factor is the character of the forces
that have been propelled into action. They are fresh, impatient and
looking for speedy solutions both politically and organisationally to
their problems. Unless a means can be found for harnessing and
integrating these forces into a powerful anti-austerity campaign, the
danger is that they could be rapidly dissipated. They will not find such
an avenue in the ruinous political policies – particularly the cuts
agenda of local Labour councils – which still dominate. Then there are
the largely moribund structures of the Labour Party which have been
reduced in most areas to an unrepresentative rump.

The solution to the conundrum of how to mobilise effectively the forces
summoned up by Corbyn, his campaign and his speeches in parliament is
mainly political, but also partly organisational. The overriding issue
in any anti-austerity campaign is the necessity for implacable
opposition to all cuts. This is the defining issue for the labour
movement at this stage and in the foreseeable future. Any councillor who
intends to vote for cuts, no matter how ‘reluctantly’, should be opposed
in elections. The battle against the Tory government’s anti-union laws
is also crucial.

Corbyn has correctly called for all Labour councils to stand together
against Osborne’s savage agenda for further cuts. If this is to mean
anything, it is that they must oppose all cuts, not just ‘some’, at the
same time introducing needs budgets linked to a mass campaign of
resistance to the Tory government’s agenda. This cannot be organised
through the machinery of the Labour Party or through Labour councillors
unless they commit themselves to a thoroughgoing anti-cuts programme.
Most Labour councillors now constitute a caste, financially rewarded –
unlike in the past – and largely cushioned from the day-to-day pressures
of ordinary working class people.

The structures of the past have gone. The right succeeded in dissipating
the voice of the organised trade union working class within the Labour
Party through the Collins Review. Blair welcomed this, stating that he
wished he would have done it himself! Ironically, this anti-trade union
‘reform’ was seized upon by the previously inert masses outside the
Labour Party to strike a blow against the right and mobilise behind
Corbyn attracted by his anti-austerity programme. This is, in effect, a
new party in the process of formation.

A new party in formation

This must be built on and deepened. Call a conference of all
anti-austerity forces which can elaborate a clear programme of no cuts,
and the necessary action at local and national level to implement this!
It is also necessary at the same time to create a parallel organised
framework around Corbyn, which could organise the campaign to involve
all anti-austerity and socialist forces in a new mass movement. The
Socialist Party and TUSC will be part of such a movement. The capitalist
media has turned on Corbyn, hurled mud in an unprecedented fashion, but
such is the mass hostility to capitalism and its parties from the
majority of the population, the working class and big sections of the
middle-class, who have suffered grievously through the crisis, then this
will have little effect if Corbyn sticks to his guns and draws on the
considerable political capital which he has gained so far. Tory guru
Lord Ashcroft, in a recent poll, found majority support for a ‘radical
socialist alternative’. Opinion polls overwhelmingly favour the
nationalisation of the railways and other failing industries.

Therefore, the conclusions to draw from Corbyn’s victory should be: no
prevarication, no retreats, no bending to the scheming splitters in the
right-wing PLP or to the ‘constitutional requirements’ of the current
Labour Party structures. Appeal outside the hallowed halls of parliament
to the mass of working people who are yearning for change. It is ominous
that Corbyn has seemingly, through press briefings of his advisors,
already retreated on some issues, including the EU, in which he has
hinted he will now campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote in next year’s referendum,
claiming his support for a mythical ‘social Europe’.

Nobody foresaw clearly in the immediate aftermath of the general
election the Corbyn surge, least of all himself and his closest allies
like John McDonnell, as they freely admit. It was the growing mass
anger, which had been stored up in the whole of the previous period,
which led to his victory. This could have found an outlet earlier if the
left trade union leaders had acted to form a new party. The mood for
this was so powerful that it seized hold of the Corbyn campaign to open
a new road in the anti-austerity struggle.

The Labour right-wing’s real political support, even in the 1980s,
rested primarily in the apparatus of the Labour party and the right-wing
led unions, and was very weak. Witness the great success at that time of
the left symbolised in the growth of Militant into a substantial force
leading mass movements in Liverpool and against the poll tax, as well as
the support for the movement around Tony Benn. Initially, the right were
forced to bend to prevailing political winds, adopting a left face,
amidst a pronounced swing towards the left, both within the union
movement and in the Labour Party itself. They only gained a modicum of
support later, through repression and purges, particularly against
Militant but of others on the left as well. This was reinforced by the
defeats of the working class: the miners’ strike, the battles in
Liverpool, etc, (in which, moreover, they, together with right-wing
union leaders, were complicit in bringing about), and the ideological
setback of the seeming triumph of capitalism following the collapse of
Stalinism.

The attacks on Militant, as we pointed out at the time, represented the
beginning of the end of the Labour Party as a specifically workers’
party at bottom. Marxists had described it as a bourgeois workers’ party
– a pro-capitalist leadership resting on a worker base. However,
subsequent events, with the assumption to the Labour leadership of Blair
and his implementation of a right-wing political and organisational
strategy, prepared the ground for his political ‘counter-revolution’.
This resulted over time in completely changing the party’s basic working
class character.

It is ironic that the right, during the leadership election, raised the
‘spectre’ of a future ‘purge’ against Blairite MPs, by which they meant
mandatory reselection. Therefore they pursued their own pre-emptive
‘purge’ by disqualifying an estimated 50,000 potential voters in the
leadership campaign. Even this did not prevent the onward march of
Corbyn and the left.

However, this will not deter the right from pursuing a war of attrition
against Corbyn and the left, to nullify the wider effects of his victory
and also to seek to water down and undermine Corbyn’s more radical
policies. At the same time, they have already surrounded him physically
and politically in the new shadow cabinet, which is stuffed with open or
concealed opponents seeking the first opportunity to return to a
Blairite agenda.

Massive counter pressure must be organised against the blackmail and
political intimidation of Labour’s right. The fate of working people is
at stake here with a great opportunity to create a new mass socialist
force which can begin to transform the situation and open up a new
socialist road. Similar opportunities have been lost here and in other
countries in the past to radically change conditions in favour of
working people and their families. We are now presented with a new
opportunity which must not be lost!